Wuthering Heights: 19 Behind-The-Scenes Secrets About How The Film Was Made

Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie take the lead as Heathcliff and Cathy in Emerald Fennell's divisive new movie.

Whether it’s people swooning over Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi’s on-screen romance or critics furiously speaking out against the changes made from the original book, Wuthering Heights is the film the whole world is talking about right now.

Based on Emily Brontë’s iconic gothic novel, Emerald Fennell’s new movie follows the story of Cathy and Heathcliff, two childhood friends who become star-crossed lovers, only for their toxic bond to lead to their downfall.

Divisive though the film may be, Wuthering Heights has all the hallmarks of Emerald Fennell’s past work, from the elaborate costumes to the meticulous detail of the sets.

For those who’ve already seen it, we’ve pulled together some surprising facts on how this latest take on Wuthering Heights made its way to the big screen…

Emerald Fennell chose to adapt Wuthering Heights because she was obsessed with the novel as a teenager – though that also came with its own issues.

Speaking at the Brontë Women’s Writing festival in September 2025, Emerald recounted how the iconic gothic novel had “cracked [her] open” when she first read it at the age of 14.

However, her reverence for the source material also made adapting it for the big screen all the more difficult.

“[It is] an act of extreme masochism to try and make a film of something that means this much to you,” she shared. “There’s an enormous amount of sado-masochism in this book. There’s a reason people were deeply shocked by it.”

During a subsequent appearance on the Penguin podcast, Emerald revealed she had re-read the book almost yearly since first discovering it as a teen, and was still impressed at how timeless the story was.

“The thing that strikes you [is] how humane and how timeless something is, and how much you feel that people have always sort of been the same,” she told interviewer Rhianna Dhillon.

Part of the appeal of the book for the filmmaker was the lack of consensus on whether it’s a toxic love story or a transcendental romance.

“Wuthering Heights is the ultimate book club book,” she told W Magazine, “because everyone can argue about it till the cows come home. And so I’m always just like, ‘You tell me’.”

The film is actually called “Wuthering Heights” – with added quotation marks – because director Emerald Fennell penned her script from memory

Much has been said about the changes the Oscar-winning filmmaker has made to the beloved source material, with some critics even branding the movie a “mockery of a classic”.

Alongside chopping the entire second half of the novel, one of the biggest changes Emerald made to the book is removing several minor characters, so the film focuses entirely on Cathy and Heathcliff.

Emerald admitted this came about when she started writing the script for Wuthering Heights from memory, as she wanted her film to be a “response and interpretation to that book and to the feeling of it” rather than a faithful adaptation.

“I think the things that I remembered were both real and not real,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “So there was a certain amount of wish fulfillment in there, and there were whole characters that I’d sort of forgotten or consolidated.”

During her chat on the Penguin podcast, Emerald admitted she loved adaptations that “exist as a response,” rather than a straight-up adaptation.

“For me, it was always about saying, ‘this is a sister or a cousin to the original text’,” she remarked. “It can’t be a twin.”

When the poster dropped, fans wanted to know why the film was called “Wuthering Heights” with quotation marks, which she explained was because the film is so different from the “untouchable” source material.

“I wanted to say early on [...] I can’t make a perfect thing out of this because it’s too difficult, but I can hopefully make some people feel the same way that I felt when I read it,” she told Penguin Penguin.

One very significant Wuthering Heights character is missing from the film

While numerous characters from the book are missing in Emerald’s movie, the absence that has drawn the most criticism is that of Hindley Earnshaw.

Emerald has explained that Cathy’s brother, Hindley, was not featured in her film so the narrative could focus more on the central romance. Hindley’s antagonist role within the story is instead replaced by Martin Clunes’ Mr. Earnshaw, whose character is tweaked considerably in this adaptation.

“Hindley still exists, I believe, but in the form of Earnshaw,” Emerald told Entertainment Weekly.

“It’s such a complicated structure, the novel, that really it would have been very, very difficult to turn that into a coherent movie because it would just be much more time.”

Emerald Fennell wanted to make the story’s ending more dramatic, so she made some big structural changes to Wuthering Heights

Of all the changes Emerald made to the source material, one of the biggest is undoubtedly the ending. While in the film, Cathy dies of sepsis before she ever has the chance to see Heathcliff again, in the book, she does get to see her lover one last time.

Emerald explained to Entertainment Weekly that this edit was “partly structural” – but there was something else behind the decision.

“We talk a lot about Romeo &........

© HuffPost